Caring for older people: a gendered practice

Abstract

This article discusses how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to the feminist study of caregiving. Interviews with caregivers of older relatives with disabilities were analyzed using a detailed conversation and membership categorization analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. The interviews were treated analytically as interactional encounters, useful to document instances of identity production and moral versions of oneself as a caregiver. The study describes some instances of the moral and relational universe in which caring practices are embedded, exploring the discursive construction of caring. Caring duties were shown to be bound to kin relationships, but significant gendering was evident in the attribution of caring responsibilities.

Understanding informal carers’ experiences of caring for older people with a hip fracture: a systematic review of qualitative studies

“…In this study, carers who were children of a hip fracture patient reported that this experience allowed them to enjoy more time with their parent. Our findings suggested that filial responsibility and gender norms play an important role in the decision about who provides care, as found in other studies [6,9,10,12,55,57] though their function and mechanism requires further study.…”

“…A family carer is defined as someone who provides unpaid, regular and substantial practical and/or emotional help to another person beyond that required as part of normal everyday life [7]. Care burden has been reported with negative consequences in physical, psychosocial and economic areas [8,9] especially among women [10][11][12], which suggests that gender is an important issue to consider in informal care.…”

Gender and discourse, gender and categorization: current developments in language and gender research

“…In order to study the way gender gets 'done', I have suggested that MCA allows analysts to examine, in the details of talk's organization, how members maintain the common sense knowledge that shapes our gendered world. It provides a 'critical edge' to ethnomethodological work (Baker, 2000;Paoletti, 2002) and allows us to track and make connections between some of the macro concerns of feminism about the societal regulation of gender and everyday experience (Smith, 1987).…”

Narrative collisions, sociocultural pressures and dementia: the relational basis of personhood reconsidered

“…For example, caring is defined as a natural female role associated with nurturing, maternal values (Ungerson, 2000;Coston and Kimmel, 2013). This impinges upon female identity, defining feminine subjectivity as well as moral worthiness (Paoletti, 2002). It is also (O'Connor, 1995).…”